Girding for a Fight, McConnell Enlists His Wife

WASHINGTON — At Harvard Business School, Elaine L. Chao kept card files on her classmates, then later kept tabs on their careers. As labor secretary, she had gold-colored coins minted with her name in bas-relief and employed a “Veep”-like staff member who carried around her bag.

And, as the steadfast spouse of Senator Mitch McConnell, she can recite the names of people who have donated to her husband — and how much they gave, friends say.

Those who have encountered Ms. Chao describe her as an unapologetically ambitious operator with an expansive network, a short fuse, and a seemingly inexhaustible drive to get to the top and stay there. Those characteristics helped lift Ms. Chao from her childhood as a Chinese immigrant who could not speak English to the heights of the George W. Bush administration, and they are coming in handy again now that her husband, the highest-ranking Republican in the Senate, confronts a re-election fight that could render him the Senate majority leader or a retiree.

Ms. Chao, who played an early role in her husband’s effort to neutralize a primary challenger he seems likely to dispatch next week, will be more crucial than ever as he turns to face a well-funded female candidate for the first time in his Senate career.

The McConnell campaign said that Ms. Chao, 61, would be a key surrogate in ads and at speaking events, especially if his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, “runs a campaign that tries to paint a picture of Mitch McConnell as having some kind of a blind spot for women’s issues,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff and a senior adviser. “Obviously we have a pretty strong firsthand testimonial from somebody who can speak to how untrue that is.”

After starring in her husband’s first campaign commercial, Ms. Chao appeared in a campaign web video, shaking an encouraging fist for him.

“She is someone who I say is really great for Senator McConnell and needs to be out there really all the time,” said Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky and a possible presidential aspirant who has forged a working, if wary, relationship with Mr. McConnell. “Because I think we need more strong women who have been successful in their careers out there.”

But while Ms. Chao’s inspiring immigrant story and high-flying résumé are clearly assets, she also reinforces Mr. McConnell’s image as the ultimate Washington establishment figure. Ms. Chao hobnobs with conservative moguls (“She’s on my board!” said Rupert Murdoch) and Obama administration movers, and she has spheres of influence stretching up the East Coast.

In New York, her father is a shipping magnate and several of her five younger sisters married Wall Street titans, including Bruce Wasserstein, the late owner of New York Magazine. In Cambridge last month, she broke ground at the Harvard Business School on a building endowed with $40 million of her family’s fortune.

She is known for being devoted to her family, and engendering great loyalty from some staff members. But she is at least equally renowned for her strong sense of self. In 2004, she likened herself and her husband to Bob and Elizabeth Dole, then the reigning Republican power couple, when she talked to The Paducah Sun about the prospect of her serving as a cabinet secretary while her husband ascended to Senate majority leader.

The power couple’s story is told on the walls of the McConnell-Chao Archives, located at the University of Louisville. On one side are McConnell family artifacts illustrating how the future senator overcame polio to play baseball and lead his high school class. There is no mention of his first wife, Sherrill Redmon, who went on to become a feminist scholar and collaborate with Gloria Steinem at Smith College.

Across the wall is Ms. Chao’s story. In 1961, at age 8, she came to the United States from Taiwan with her mother and two sisters on a 37-day voyage to New York. (When she considered running for office in California, she emphasized that the first port of call was Los Angeles.) Her father had arrived three years earlier and worked three jobs a day on his way to building a shipping fortune that took the family from Queens to Westchester.

Ms. Chao graduated from Mount Holyoke and eventually became a White House fellow in 1983, went on to lead Asian-Americans for Bush/Quayle in 1988, and was appointed deputy transportation secretary under Secretary Elizabeth Dole. In 1991, President George Bush appointed her director of the Peace Corps and, the next year, she was called on to clean up the United Way of America, which was suffering under allegations of misappropriation of funds. As she traveled the country, Chinese-American families would wait to meet her in airports.

It is during that period that, as Ms. Chao puts it in a short exhibit film, “in pops Mitch McConnell in my life.”

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Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife, the former labor secretary Elaine Chao, at the Republican National Convention in 2012.CreditMark Wilson/Getty Images

Mr. McConnell had come to Washington in the 1960s as an intern, and later was an aide in the Senate. He befriended Stuart Bloch, a public interest lobbyist against the Vietnam War who wore a cape and Borsalino hat. (“You have to distinguish yourself,” he explained in a phone interview.) The conservative and liberal young men hit it off, sharing dinners and celebrating each other’s birthday.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Bloch, who was married to Julia Chang Bloch, herself a Chinese immigrant and a future ambassador to Nepal, decided to fix up Mr. McConnell, a bachelor at the time.

Mr. Bloch, now a peace-sign flashing Washington lawyer partial to American flag cummerbunds, oversized sunglasses and the nickname “the Blochbuster,” invited the senator to a candlelight dinner with Ms. Chao, a protégée of his wife’s. “I don’t want to say that sparks flew,” Mr. Bloch said, “because that’s not the way either of them is.”

But the Bush administration appointee and the increasingly powerful Kentucky senator saw something in each other, and she ultimately chose Mr. McConnell over another suitor, C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to the elder President Bush.

“It was a long time ago,” said Mr. Gray, who declined to comment further on the relationship. He added that Ms. Chao “is extremely well connected and she keeps a broad range of friends and contacts and she works tirelessly, I think, for him.”

Mr. Bloch, now 71, put it another way: “Tiger wife!” he erupted, describing Ms. Chao as “made of titanium.”

In Washington, Ms. Chao organizes the orientation for the spouses of Republican senators but also gives speeches from her position at the Heritage Foundation, where she is a fellow, and where the ultraconservative president, Jim DeMint, has encouraged her husband’s critics. (“She’s at Heritage as a fellow, and there is Heritage trying to blow him up,” said Richard Hohlt, a Washington lobbyist and a friend of the couple.)

But Ms. Chao is less partisan in her socializing. This year, she was a host of a dinner to welcome Penny Pritzker, Mr. Obama’s top donor, to the administration as commerce secretary. She spent the evening next to Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser. “I remember looking across the table and seeing the two of them just laughing,” said Catherine Reynolds, a philanthropist and event co-host.

In Kentucky, Ms. Chao proved an eager student of local politics and provided some critical behind-the-scenes assistance to her husband. Soon after Mr. Paul upset the Republican establishment, and Mr. McConnell’s chosen candidate, by winning the 2010 primary, his wife, Kelley, became so distraught over critical coverage that she questioned whether he should move ahead. That is when she received an unexpected call from Ms. Chao.

“ ‘You know, politics is a contact sport,’ ” Ms. Chao said in a “brisk way, like ‘Come on,’ ” according to Ms. Paul. When she complained about the harsh headlines in the The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ms. Chao dismissed it: “That rag!”

Neither Ms. Chao nor Mr. McConnell agreed to be interviewed for this article, but a former top adviser to both of them, Steven Law, now the president of the Republican “super PAC” American Crossroads, called Ms. Chao “a loyal, fierce, focused competitor.”

She can also bestow a softer touch. Trey Grayson, who lost to Mr. Paul and now is the director of Harvard’s Institute for Politics, for which Ms. Chao sits on the advisory board, recalled that she asked by name about his wife and daughter back when he was a political nobody. And Jan Karzen, a friend of Mr. McConnell’s since they started working on campaigns together in the 1970s, said that when speaking to female groups in Kentucky, Ms. Chao softened her husband’s image by speaking of the senator “in a feminine, wifely way.”

But Ms. Chao can seem bored by Kentucky’s less political traditions. At the Kentucky Derby, hatless and in a sober white skirt suit, she holed up with her husband in the exclusive confines of the Clubhouse Director’s Room. At Louisville football games, she wears dark sunglasses so that she can furtively doze off.

“We always tell him, ‘You have been working your wife too hard,’ ” said Dee Kern, who tailgates with the McConnells.

Ms. Chao wakes for politics — and combat. When the liberal group Progress Kentucky posted on Twitter that Mr. McConnell’s marriage to her “may explain why your job moved to #China!” she appealed directly to the camera in a political ad in which she said, “Far-left special interests are also attacking my ethnicity, even attacking Mitch’s patriotism, because he’s married to me.”

“That’s how low some people will stoop,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Girding for a Fight, McConnell Enlists His Wife. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe